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Posted on 05/04/2013 12:00:11 PM PDT by neverdem
Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood’s epigrammatic founder, was never at a loss for the chilling turn of phrase. His rally cry, the Brotherhood’s signature pledge that “Jihad is our way” and “Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope,” is the soundtrack of the “Arab Spring.” It speaks for a region over two-thirds of whose putative liberty lovers prefer to kill apostates than to abide freedom of conscience. Their embrace of the very sharia chauvinism that ties together Banna, bin Laden, the Saudi royals, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev explodes the Western myth of the moderate Muslim majority.
Yet the United States government clings to the myth. Even as Boston buries its dead, just as they must do from Cairo to Thailand, Americans are instructed not to notice the inevitable progression from Islamic-supremacist ideology to aggression and murder. The See No Islam campaign entails such inanities as portrayal of the Brotherhood as a “largely secular” outfit. Thus, few of us have heard of Banna’s odes to “the art of death.” To know them is to see the farce in President Obama’s sudden angst over hunger-striking jihadists, and in the renewed vigor of his quest to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
Mind you, cells are regularly searched in every prison. Gitmo is unusual only in the heightened necessity of this routine. Jihadists frequently attack the guards with weapons improvised and hidden in their cells. The Holy Koran, meanwhile, is not wholly Koran — jihadists often use it to pass each other messages. No surprise there: Islamic supremacists take the book to command war against infidels — under the crazy notion that scores of verses like Sura 8:12, Allah’s command to “strike off [the unbelievers’] heads and strike off every fingertip of them” in order to “cast terror into [their] hearts,” actually mean what they say.
Alas, as we’ve seen before, the Pentagon brass — the guys who see jihadist mass murder at a U.S. military base as “workplace violence” — would sooner repeal the First Amendment than abide any mishandling of the Holy Koran. Indeed, Gitmo protocols have long directed that, where possible, only white-gloved Muslim military personnel should touch the sacred text, even when cells are being tossed. The Defense Department has thus internalized the supremacist principle that infidels are not fit to touch things Islamic, the very principle by which our friends the Saudis forbid public professions of Christianity and ban non-Muslims from entering the cities of Mecca and Medina.
While we avert our eyes from the ugliness of our enemies’ ideology, they go to school on us. Guerilla training for jihadists prominently includes propaganda. Much of this, naturally, is geared to rally the Left’s assorted shock troops of Western self-loathing. In equal part, though, it is theater. A good hunger strike works wonders. Like all real jihad, it is what Banna famously called “the art of death.” The omnipresent specter of martyrdom, he knew, was a transformative agent of influence.
Relying on Muslim scripture in a book he called “Jihad,” Banna explained that Allah reserves the greatest “reward” for the “martyrs and fighters in His way.” Only those “who have modeled themselves upon the martyrs in their performance of jihad can join them in this reward.” Performance was not a word chosen idly.
As the late Arabist scholar Robert P. Mitchell observed in his seminal 1960 study, The Society of Muslim Brothers, Banna understood that what made jihad so effective was the “relationship always implied between it and the possibility, even the necessity, of death and martyrdom.” Death is the salient aim of jihad, whether it is the terror of killing infidels or the power of the jihadist’s example in surrendering his own life for the cause. That power is the unparalleled capacity of art to move and inspire.
For the jihadist, Banna declared that “death is art.” It is the most persuasive demonstration of submission to the Koran’s command that Muslims love death more than life — an injunction Banna’s kindred spirits at al-Qaeda have turned into a taunt at Americans. The idea, Mitchell elaborates, is that “victory can only come with the mastery of ‘the art of death.’ . . . The movement cannot succeed, Banna insists, without this dedicated and unqualified kind of jihad.”
Such a jihad must continue to be waged even when the supremacist has been rendered hors de combat, for it embraces any available means to defeat the infidel’s will. “Fighting the unbelievers,” Banna urged, “involves all possible efforts that are necessary to dismantle the power of the enemies of Islam.”
The hunger strike is on because the jihadists figure Obama is ripe for the taking. Though he has no compunction about quickie drone rub-outs thousands of miles out of sight, he is petrified by the prospect of performance-art jihad: The languishing martyrdom of self-starving death cultists, whose rapt audience of Obama favorites — Brotherhood front groups and the Lawyer Left — remind the administration every long day that he promised to shut this theater down almost five years ago.
This week, they drove the president to babbling incoherence. The hunger strike, he said, reaffirms the need to close Gitmo. But the jihadists are not starving themselves over Gitmo; they are starving themselves over being detained without trial — which they would be even if Obama got his way and Congress green-lighted his plan to stash them at a white-elephant prison near Chicago.
Well, there is one difference. Once the show moved stateside, the art of death would not only draw enhanced, sympathetic coverage from the Obamedia; the terrorists would also unquestionably be in the jurisdiction of the federal courts for all purposes — not just for the novel habeas corpus carve-out the Supreme Court manufactured so our enemies could challenge their designation as wartime enemy combatants. As long as a detainee is in Cuba, a judge may only tell the executive branch it has no authority to hold him under the law of war. If the detainees were in the United States, though, some judge would surely assume the power to order them released.
Have we mentioned that Obama, who still rails against indefinite detention without civilian trial despite having continued the practice since 2009, has already put over 200 like-minded lawyers on the federal bench? That he will seat a couple of hundred more by the time he’s through?
The vast majority of Americans mainly remember the art of death practiced on 9/11, not to mention in Boston just two weeks ago. Consequently, we couldn’t care less whether or not the Gitmo jihadists starve their way to the Great Orgy in the Sky. We say: Meet the art of death with the fruits of life. Instead of Holy Korans, let’s have our white-gloved guards deliver the prisoners a heaping halal turkey dinner every day — on videotape. If they choose not to eat it, that’s on them. Just send the leftovers to the school lunch program . . . after all, there’s a sequester on.
Unfortunately, we are being governed by the jihadists’ target audience.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.
To the headline: duh!
i think they mythed something here it is an outright lie
Let the Gitmo muzzies starve themselves and when they croak, let the riots erupt in Kabul & Islamabad & Cairo & Gaza. Let the world’s biggest cesspool of moral savagery that is today’s Islam explode in murderous rage. So what’s new?
Nuke Makkah NOW!
America nor Europe cannot survive much longer unless they reverse the spread of Islam.
Large scale Muslim immigration into the West has been a cultural disaster.
The founders were on the ball, to bad it was dropped.
George Washington was serving as president in 1784, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin meet to discuss islamic ‘pirateship’ attacks on American merchant ships.
March 1785, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams went to London to negotiate with Tripoli’s envoy, Ambassador Sidi Haji to end the attacks on the American merchant ships.
One month later the Ambassador wrote Jefferson the following:
It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise.
Immediately prior to Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, Congress passed naval legislation that, among other things, provided for six frigates that ‘shall be officered and manned as the President of the United States may direct.
In 1802, Jefferson requested authority to deal with the pirates, Congress passed “An act for the Protection of Commerce and seamen of the United States against the Tripolitan cruisers.
In 1802, Thomas Jefferson said there was only way to deal with people who’s only goal is to kill you.
in 2009, Barack Obama, during his Cairo speech, said: “I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America’s story.”
For once obama, is correct.
Thomas Jefferson said: we must fight islam and we must win.
We have become the only civilization in history whose ongoing conquest is solely by means of words: i.e. "racist," "the poor," "women and minorities," "the children," "Rights," "inclusion," "room at the table," "the big tent" and of course "compassion."
Many of our own people are even supporting the ongoing conquest smling in good natured indolence. We once ruled the World; today we are human nothings whining puking and mewling our way into oblivion.
Islam is from the devil himself!
This too shall pass.
Or percieved wrongs.
>The founders were on the ball, too bad it was dropped.<
.
The ball was dropped intentionally.
We were an exceptional nation at one time, but it did not sit well with the rest of the world. Nobody likes an oddball.
And who is the rest of the world? The UN and the One World Governemnt movement to which our last four presidents have been members of. Even today, the UN is trying to meddle with our internal affairs and not even one congresscritter objects publicly.
jihad bump
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